God can I have that lost time back please?
Man, this feels like hunting incredibly easy prey. Actually, it doesn’t even feel like hunting at all, more like kicking the crutches off a crippled person, so I’m not quite so comfortable doing this. But I digress, it must be done. Because Netflix will fund absolutely everything, a lot of new shows or films that lands on the platform with a big red ‘A Netflix Original Series/Movie’ plastered on them come with a handy red target on their back too. Why? Well, we’re all quite aware of how shallow and terrible some of these Netflix productions are. Critiquing or writing about one of these is just too easy precisely because they’re such a difficult watch. Good thing I gain just as much pleasure from writing about good cinema as I do from rotten cinema. There’s something quite virile and empowering about pointing and laughing at its failures.
Do be sure to confront yourself with the reality check of, “when was the last time you made a film huh? At least they’re trying out here.” That’s all well and good but if I had the option between making a terrible film or not making one at all, I’d forget all about what cinema even is.
My intros are getting out of control. They’re spreading like literary carcinoma. It must be stopped with a dose of wild radiation in the form of a paragraph break.
A grey Valentine’s Day spent entirely in bed with my girlfriend, both of us in a queer sort of mood for something horrid for the eyes, ended up with us watching The Perfect Date (2019). We picked three of the most deformed looking romantic comedies on Netflix and this one stole the dirt crown. The plot, if you could even fucking call it that, follows witty yet superficial student Brooks gearing up for university/college, his eyes set on Yale, hell-bent on making it big in the world. Accepting the job to chaperone an eccentric and acidulous girl to her high school dance, they end up developing a friendship which, surprise surprise, ends up in them dating. Realising that he’s got the chaperoning skills to pay the bills, he launches an app with his best friend allowing people to hire him for a night to be their perfect date. And because there are certain conventions, even in romances, things get complicated. This is the sort of stuff that appeals to the idiotically young and terminally bored.
I shiver with disgust to even call it cinematography, so whatever the hell that even was, was pretty bland and awful. It was like staring at a white washed wall, there was nothing interesting to behold in either camera movement, composition or mise-en-scène. Let me just stress this here, I know it’s a terrible film and I don’t expect it to leave me floored with its cinematic virtuosity, I expect the exact opposite, so let be fulfil my bullying fantasy here.
To call the characters underwritten would be an overstatement. Their motivations are as shallow as a puddle on flat ground, and the way they spoon feed their motives to us is quite condescending. Let me work their kinks out by myself man! The acting is alright, sometimes it dips to the sort of stiffness you’d find on a corpse. I saw Brooks and Celia getting together from a lightyear away, I would’ve kinda liked it if they had just remained friends, it would have flown in the face of my expectations of this film and I’d appreciate my expectations being shown the door, but no, that clearly didn’t happen.
What tramples all over my nerves the most about this film is the egregious voice over, the kind you’ll find in every plebian teenage film of this sort, which sets out the characters psyche and desires from the very get-go. I implore you to stop this insanity. Why must I be told what they want and how they’ll go about acquiring it, can’t you just convey that more inconspicuously?
Alright I feel like I’ve said enough, I’ve gained all the pleasure I can from kicking this film in the stomach, anymore and it’ll just be tiring.
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